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In some cases, Steam on Linux greets your with an error dialog stating:

OpenGL GLX context is not using direct rendering, which may cause performance problems

This is because Steam ships copies of several system libraries which may interfere with other libraries on your system that it doesn’t replace. This can easily be fixed. Just remove Steams copies and let it use your system’s default libraries. Here’s a simple script to accomplish that:

The C# editor in Visual Studio supports collapsing/expanding namespaces, classes and methods (aka the outlining feature). Unlike the C++ editor, it doesn’t allow to collapse blocks (everything with braces, such as if/else, using, switch, etc.). However, you can retrofit this feature with the C# Outline 2013 extension.

Result

When developing private software projects, you not always want to push it to Github right away if you’ve got the hopes to make some bits of money out of it, right? But just keeping your Git repository on your local disk isn’t the best choice either. If you happen to have a server at home, you should use that to backup your repository. Of course you should do that the Git way, i.e., set up a bare repository and use that as your origin remote to push to.

That’s particularly easy if you own a Synology DiskStation. Not too long ago, an official Git Server installation package was made available:

Enable SSH and user grant access rights

After installation, you get access to a simple GUI where you can allow local users to access Git over SSH:

Tick the checkbox for your user and press Apply. To make this work, you also need to enable SSH access to your DiskStation. For that, head into the Control Panel, navigate to Terminal & SNMP and tick the Enable SSH Service checkbox. For setting up a bare Git repository, you have to log in over SSH (assuming diskstation is a proper hostname):
$ ssh root@diskstation

Recently, I discovered BitTorrent Sync, which seems to satisfy most of my file syncing demands. It’s encrypted client-side, cross-platform and works behind NATs and firewalls. While it is currently still proprietary (who cares, really), it is available for many devices. Besides the usual Windows / Mac binaries, you can find it on Android’s Play Store. Most interestingly, they provide ARM binaries. If you are a happy Synology NAS user, you can add the SynoCommunity package repository directly. That’s been the elevator pitch, check the community forums for more details.

Installation

First of all, you need to add Packman’s Essentials repository to install the btsync package. This is necessary due to the licensing terms of BitTorrent Sync, which don’t allow redistribution. Thus the btsync package will run a script (during installation) that downloads the btsync binary from BitTorrent servers (very much like the flash plugin installer on openSUSE). Either way, you’ll end up with btsync on your disk. For openSUSE Factory, the steps are (as root):
$ zypper ar http://packman.inode.at/suse/Factory/Essentials
$ zypper refresh
$ zypper install btsync

On recent openSUSE releases, systemd allows to start daemons as non-root users. Running btsync under your user rather than root avoids messing up file ownership and allows several people on the same machine to have their own distinct btsync configuration. So for the user saschpe (replace with your username), the commands are (as root):
$ systemctl start btsync@saschpe
$ systemctl enable btsync@saschpe

Configuration

To allow parallel usage for multiple users, the btsync daemon listens on port 8888 + $YOUR_USER_ID per default. So if your user’s UID (check /etc/passwd) is 1000, you can find btsync’s web interface at http://localhost:9888. This is how looks like:

The credentials can be found at $HOME/.btsync/sync.conf. The interesting part is the auto-generated password (which you could change), the username will match your Unix user account. However, you may also want to change the listen address to something different. So this is the config section you want to adjust:

Since eBay recently lost a complete database dumb, I thought let’s join the other 145 million guys and change me good old password. While doing that I wanted to update my mail address too. BTW, I recently changed to mailbox.org and I am very (very very) happy with it. Unfortunatley though eBay’s very (very very) secure e-mail address validation disallows having the eBay username as localpart (as in localpart@domain.com). Wow I thought, that is what I call secure by default! Funny side note, my old e-mail address also includes my eBay user name, but nobody complained about that some 10 years ago. Well then I thougth, let’s check support. After almost going nuts in their craptastic present-stupid-solutions-but-avoid-revealing-the-bloody-support-form manor, I went for the (free) hotline. So after a 28 minutes long patience test (which I obviously won), I was told by a very friendly lady that she isn’t allowed to change the mail address by hand. German data security laws, she said. Fuck that, I thought :-) She also recommended not using this mail address ;-) But that led me to suddenly remember that mailbox.org supports the plus-extensions (or whatever it’s called in the RFCs). So I ended up trying username+ebay@mailbox.org and it worked! So kudos to eBay for not disallowing plus signs in mail addresses (no sarcasm here, many services do). Even better, the next time they loose all their users data, spammers will only get the alias address and I can just block that. Nice!

Since I’ve been asked this recently, if you want to avoid typing your sudo password again after opening up another shell session (with konsole, gnome-terminal, screen or whatever), simply add the following to /etc/sudoers (use sudo visudo to modify the file):